Infinite Years Go By
by The Exile
Summary: Gaspar and Spekkio are the only people who understand what its like to live for infinite years until a peculiar newcomer arrives at the End of Time.


Infinite Years Go By 

The strangest person I've ever met here? It has to be John Claris. I've been here for longer than you can possibly comprehend- time holds no meaning for me- but I've never, ever met anyone stranger than John Claris. He even made Spekkio look normal.

I first met him when he stepped out of the Cupboard. Neither of us could open the Cupboard, even with Spekkio's awesome powers of destruction and my time manipulation abilities. The lock was slightly skewed in all six dimensions. Then, one day, it just opened, and John stepped out. He was a ragged creature, with matted black hair and a straggly beard that covered most of his face except for two small, slightly feral eyes. He wore a black and white striped shirt and black trousers. He fell out of the cupboard, picked himself up and stared at Gaspar as though he had never seen a human before. The cupboard disappeared behind him.

"Has it been infinite years already?"

Gaspar nodded, "This is the year Infinite, yes. Welcome to the End of Time."

"Then it'll be around here somewhere."

"What will?"

"Parallel six." he said irritably, pushing past Gaspar and carefully examining everything in the courtyard - the lamppost, the save point, the Day of Lavos bucket. Okay, so there aren't very many things in the courtyard. Material possessions kind of lose their meaning after the first few billion years.

"What's a Parallel Six? I know everything in the End of Time, if it is here, I can help you look for it."

"Parallel Six is..." he stopped and scratched his head. He did not finish for several hours. "...Never mind. I can't explain to someone from the Outside."

"Outside of what?"

He stopped looking around, swore softly and scrabbled around in his trouser pocket for something. It was a crumpled piece of paper. "Drat, are they sure it's Parallel Two I need to be in?"

I watched him for a while. He poked the End of Time some more, searching every time gate, dismantling the Epoch, fighting Spekkio to study his battle tactics. He took up temporal mechanics and did a PhD in infinite-year physics. He built a new watch that didn't explode in the End of Time, something I've been meaning to get around to doing for three million years now. Eventually he beat up Spekkio's Red Nu, which annoyed the Master of War greatly. and wrote a new theory of Nu, which Melchior promptly plagiarised. He told me his life story, which was quite long as he had lived infinite years but uneventful due to spending most of it in prison. When he was 35, his friend Dunbar went to prison for 25 years for shoplifting because of a freak temporal distortion. He managed to get into the prison to find out what was happening but found himself in an infinite loop. It was a relief to be out, as the Warden was not nice to him and used him for medical experiments, although it was hard to adjust to not being in a carefully controlled institution any more. Then, approximately ten billion years later, he turned to me and said "Damn, that was a 1! What kind of a 1 looks like a 2? I'm EARLY!"

"You're in the year Infinite, John. How do you propose to be later?" I asked.

He sat on a rock and thought about this for another ten thousand years. Then he created a massive paradox by flying the Epoch into a time gate and used the distortion-energy to rebuild the Cupboard. He stepped into it and it disappeared. I don't know if he ever found Parallel Six, but it should be easier for him now. You see, I'm looking for it too. Spekkio is as well.

There are three spatial dimensions and three temporal dimensions (current time in relation to personal timeline, current time in relation to key event and personal timeline in relation to key event, aka punctuality) and a sixth dimension, which is some kind of universal key event that time can be abstractly measured in relation to. There are six parallel worlds: late, early, on time, the state of being I like to refer to as 'when late and early bite each other on the ass', nonexistence at the time and place of an event (aka death), and Parallel Six.

I really need to get out of this stuffy old courtyard...


End file.
